The first milestone of Project Indiana (part of the OpenSolaris.org community) is now available - called "OpenSolaris Developer Preview." The OpenSolaris Developer Preview is the first milestone of Project Indiana. It is a single CD combined live/install image: a core operating system, kernel, system libraries, a desktop environment and a package management system. It is not a final release and is intended for developers to try, test, and provide feedback. Get your copy now.

Instead of a project that has a solid establishment and firm hirarchy, i can imagine some people find it refreshing contributing to this project. Reminds me of linux posting his first kernel.

Except for the fact that Linus intentionally avoided the requirement for copyright assignment, or the holding the right to relicense at will. Which is probably the biggest reason that the linux kernel acquired the development contributions that it did.

Not to knock Sun, I always applaud an organization opening their code. But let's keep it in perspective, Sun isn't looking to build a community, they're looking to utilize a community.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, as long as the participants understand that. But let's not make it out to be something it isn't, rather, let's look at what Sun is offering and figure out how best for the community to leverage it reciprocally.

My cynical side still thinks the GNU community is waiting for Sun to follow through on their commitment to dual-license under v3, so that they can fork it for their own use and try and extricate the linux kernel while spewing forth a number of different solaris spins that are incompatible with other solaris spins. Sure, linux is always criticized for "over" distribution, but incompatibilities in linux tend to be related to userland. Sun's requirement for attribution, combined with the hints towards a dual-license CDDL/GPLv3 situation, could wind up with a number of forked, incompatible kernels combined with a common userland. Is this any better?

My even more cynical side still questions the ultimate intention here from Sun. Sorry, but I can't help thinking Sun is simply trying to leverage the linux community, while hiding the fact that they are still predominantly proprietary corporate oriented.

Still, never look a gift horse in the mouth. So I'll certainly give props to Sun for doing this, while still interjecting my opinion when people imply that this is the second coming of linux. Because, it simply isn't.